Her short film, Prom Night depicts the story of a girl entering into a night filled with memorable moments from Prom. Audience members get to sit back and feel as if they are Celia’s prom date, while the entire film is shot from her date‘s point of view.

From the start, the doors open up revealing multicolor balloons and streamers covering the surfaces of the room. Inside Celia stands waiting patiently for her date in a light powder blue dress. The camera follows her to the refreshment table where Celia grabs a drink and lures her date to the middle of the dance floor. Extreme close-ups on Celia’s face shows her acting skills as she morphs between different famous characters. Images of Virgin Mary, Pamela Anderson, Lolita, Madonna and Carrie all transform and disappear within seconds. Finally she exits the room and reappears behind double doors. Now we are exiled outside the room, only able to watch her voyeuristically through the windows. Dancing by herself, the view from outside the double doors shows Celia sashaying across the dance floor evoking the phrase, “dance as if no one is watching.”  Stepping back from the windows, the prom night ends leaving nothing but Celia dancing aimlessly by herself to Be My Baby by The Ronettes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out more videos of Celia Rowlson-Hall on vimeo and also check out her website.

On Sunday May 6th 2012, a crowd of 100+ people came out to The Wild Project in the East Village for a screening and dance extravaganza by the Girl Walk//All Day community.

Opening the show was a performance from by the flex group Street’s Finest with a guest appearance by Anne Marsen (star of Girl Walk//All Day). Sporting new pink hair, Anne danced fiercely along side the six guys in the group, who popped, locked, and dropped it as soon as they walked onto the stage. In black preppy outfits with red sneakers, they danced to some of today’s hottest songs including Ellie Goulding, Starry Eyed. In between each song mix, a comedic voice would transition into the next song keeping the audience members on their toes. Throughout the performance were movements of slow motion, acrobatics, tutting, and freestyle clumps. One particular moment that stood out was when one male dancer supported all of his weight from his arms while being on top of another partner’s back. The audience embraced the energy of this high energy group with their comedic styles and facial gestures. At the end everyone got to their feet to applaud this new crowd favorite. Who knows maybe we will see them on America’s Best Dance Crew?!

Following the performance the noisy crowd started to settle down and take their seats as the film began. Girl Walk//All Day is a feature-length music video that follows three young dancers across the city of New York. In 12 chapters, this music video of epic proportions showcases some of the most fascinating places in New York City, while capturing the lives of average people. As the popular beats of Girl Talk’s music echoed through the hall, young adults in their 20’s began standing and bopping. As the upbeat music continued, more people began to stand and the knee pounding turned into full on jovial dancing. With beers in their hands, the crowd enjoyed the entertainment and continued to do their own thing. At funny moments in the film such as when Anne Marsen lays anxiously on the street in a white sign displaying, “Dance With Me,” audience members laughed, clapped, and hollered at the big projection in front of them. As the 12 Chapters were wrapping up, five young adults in their 20’s boogied their way onto the stage. Within seconds, a majority of the audience members were standing, skipping their way down the stairs and landing themselves on the open dance floor. As the end credits began pouring down the screen, the entire crowd eagerly clapped and roared and continued to dance wildly to the pulsating music.

After a while the crowd became smaller but some still continued to dance onstage including the film’s star, Anne Marsen. With her pink hair radiating off the overhead lighting, I made my way to her eager to ask some questions. Upon greeting the magenta colored hair-do girl, I realized Anne was one of the most down-to-earth people you will ever meet. In her black button down shirt, she stood before me still bouncing to the music and smiling. With the music still roaring out of the sound speakers, I asked her, “How does dancing make you feel?” Anne smiled and leaned forward simply stating that dance makes her feel, “alive and free.” I proceeded to ask her the most memorable aspect of shooting the film. Pondering for a second, Marsen commented, “pretty much everything” She later commented on the sections where she was filmed on Wall Street and with all the shopping bags. She continued to explain to me when walking with all the shopping bags, she would plow through people as if she was someone important. Not afraid to act snobbish and get a reaction from average humans, she would bump their shoulders and separate groups who were in conversations. As we laughed about what the people must of thought, I left her with one final question, “What could you say to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?” She answered by saying, “get a camera and just do it.” She mentioned that finding friends and working together is a great way to get started. Thanking Anne for her time, she humbly smiled and continued to dance on the stage as her pink hair glistened across the theatre. Stepping away, I wondered what’s next for this upcoming star.

New York City watch out for Girl Walk//All Day. Not only is it showcasing some of the area’s best talent but it’s keeping the passion of dance alive for generations to come.

Check out all of Girl Walk// All Day videos on vimeo.

Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

While Mata Hari’s career was spent mostly in the service of men, she really yearned for artistic legitimacy and coveted the role of Salomé (played by many lesbian performers of the time). Ruhl showed the ‘Dance of the 7 Veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s Salomé and explained the allure of the part this way:

“This clip illustrates my favorite part of the [Oscar Wilde] play, which is that everyone in the play is looking at another character and desiring them, but that character never looks back at them… King Herod is looking at Salomé very lecherously and his wife [Queen Herodia] is saying ‘Don’t look at her!’…Salome is looking at John the Baptist, who won’t look at anyone but up toward God, because he has this annoying piety…I think that it’s a really amazing, on Oscar Wilde’s part, critique of the sexual roles going on at that time in Victorian England, where nobody gets to have what they actually want…and this role really spoke to a lot of lesbian performers.”

In addition to Ruhl’s film and curated selections, two other experimental filmmakers, Amy Greenfield and Kerrie Welsh showed shorts and took part in the discussion.

Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire was made from footage shot of a multimedia, avant gard strip show. After looking at the footage of the show, she wanted to show a thread between her work and the early films Thomas Edison made of female performers dancing in the style of Loie Fuller, the most famous of which is Annabelle Dances. Made in 1894, Annabelle Dances is of Annabelle in a costume of billowing fabric that she swirled and moved in undulating and serpentine ways. The film was hand tinted in different colors to simulate the lighting effects of live stage shows. Greenfield opens her film with footage of Edison’s Annabelle Dances and dissolves into her modern version with nude women whirling fabric. The video was also hand tinted in a similar way to the early film and the rapidly shifting edits make the images whirl past the viewers eyes giving a spinning sensation to the watcher.

Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… draws from the aesthetic of home movies in the 1950s, and starts out showing a typical nuclear family in a nondescript suburb where everything is “hunky dory”. The mood quickly shifts as the pretty wife has an extramarital affair and the father goes into a jealous rage.  A dark retelling of the children’s rhyme, “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well,” Welsh’s film shows everything that would never be included  in a  typical family home movie, and incases it all in a shell of normalcy.

Kerrie Welsh, Amy Greenfield, Anna Brady Nuse (moderator), and Amy Ruhl

The three filmmakers shared a mutual interest in the history of feminism in film, and a desire open up roles for women (and ways of interpreting those roles).

Greenfield commented, “What interests me, is living through 1980’s feminism, that what we’re doing, using the female erotic, not rejecting any aspect of the female and cinema, was a no no then – I was very persecuted. But audiences are coming around again to my films and it’s a wonderful time for seeing films like this.”

Kerrie Welsh replied, “One of the things I think is interesting [about Ruhl’s film], is the way it is engaging with all of these historical moments in a way that is also engaging with the film medium. So when you talk about the female erotic, I feel like [Ruhl’s Mata Hari] is really using performance, she’s using her own body, in a way that is referencing not some natural female eroticism, but all of these difference modes of performance that have been naturalized  or associated with sexuality in various ways. I think the questioning of that in this really funny weird way is what speaks to me about the film.”

Ruhl explained that while Mata Hari never worked in film herself, she became a rich subject for other great actresses who depicted her on screen, including Theda Bera, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

“What really interested me [about Mata Hari] was that she really defined this subset of femme fatale.”

Related articles:

• “Mata Hari, the Technologized Body: A Conversation with Amy Ruhl” by Kerrie Welsh, On-Verge
• http://www.uniondocs.org/2012-05-07-kinetic-cinema-with-amy-ruhl/
• Amy Ruhl on Vimeo
• Amy Greenfield articles in Move the Frame
• Flesh into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield, by Robert Haller Intellect Press.

Dance Film Association is offering its members post-production funding.

Guidelines
1. Deadline: July 1st, 2012
2. Notification: August 1st, 2012
3. Funding Available: Up to $2,500

Requirements
1. Applicant must be a member of Dance Films Association.
2. Only films that have completed shooting and are in production will be considered.
3. You may not apply if you’ve received a Post-Production Grant previously.
4. Applicants will be required to submit a link to a cut of the proposed project that is five minutes or under in length that expresses the project’s intent, scope, and aesthetic to the best of your ability at this stage. This sample may not necessarily be the first five minutes of the film.

Application
Please contact Brighid Greene brighid@dancefilms.org for access to the application.

Funding Panel

Greg Vander Veer was a cameraman for the recent film Sally Gross: The Pleasure of Stillness, about the revolutionary dancer and choreographer. He was also a cameraman on the upcoming film Lucky Dog.   For the Broadway musical,The Color Purple, Greg filmed behind-the-scenes activities for the two-year duration of the show. He is also a video contributor and co-editor of IndexMagazine.com. Greg attended Hendrix College where he received a BA for Interdisciplinary Studies: Historical Film.  He also spent one year at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia where he studied Documentary Film Production. Greg currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Check out Greg’s newest project, Keep Dancing.

A filmmaker, choreographer, and performer, Gabri Christa brings her roots from Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean to her directing and film work. Now based in New York, (via Havana, Amsterdam and Puerto Rico) she has received many distinguished awards for her Choreographies and Short Films including a Guggenheim Fellowship for her choreography.  In 2008, Gabri Christa was invited to the Pangea Day Film Festival as “One of the World’s 100 most promising Filmmakers” and her film “High School” received an ABC TV award for Creative excellence. For more info on Gabri Christa click here.

Edited by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg, this issue also features a report on the recent Screendance Symposium in Brighton by Claudia Kappenberg and Sarah Whatley.

Location: Z-Lab at UC Berkeley
2200 University Ave,Berkeley,CA 94720
Teacher: Ben Estabrook
Time: 10-4pm
Cost: $350
Student discounts available–see registration page for details.

An enlightening workshop that investigates the relationship between the camera and the dancer.  Participants will analyze film clips and partake in a series of hands-on exercises throughout the week.  Discussions on strategies such as how to achieve a cinematic look in films, the importance of sound design, adapting a stage work for the camera, and why some types of dance work better on camera than others will also take place.

Participants will have the opportunity to create a screendance study, but will need to provide your own camera (DSLRs are welcome), however a finished project is not expected. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own work if they would like feedback. The recommended reading for the workshop is Making Video Dance by Katrina McPherson (this is not required).

REGISTER NOW

Mata Hari, an erotic dancer and courtesan, was executed by firing squad for double espionage in World War I. After her death, she was decapitated, her body donated to anatomical study, and her head displayed at the Musee d’Anatomie in Paris. In her latest short, How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, filmmaker Amy Ruhl takes Mata Hari’s tragic ending and reimagines her as a strip tease artist whose ability to remove her head takes Belle Époche Paris by storm. Using Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a site for narrative and historical interaction, the film draws upon the cultural phenomenon of “Salomania” among largely lesbian and bisexual female performers in order to engage with an era when Orientalism sold, scandal became success, and deviant desires equaled a crime punishable by death.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, Ruhl will show How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, using the film as a site to examine how the female body, under the unique technology of cinema, has been the primary source of spectacle since the beginnings of film. Ruhl’s work engages with sources ranging from George Méliès’ “trick films,” to Nazimova’s Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils) to Vera Chytilova’s phantasmagoria scene in Daisies, one of the most lauded Czech new wave films. She will present examples of these influences and discuss how they have informed How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body which was made in part by collaging early film footage together with live action animation.

The program will open with two shorts by contemporary experimental filmmakers, Kerrie Welsh and Amy Greenfield.

Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… is a dark retelling of the children’s rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” that illustrates the disparity between the narratives we construct and the realities they represent.

Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire is the final film in her acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle and depicts women “clothed” in electronically generated flaming colors, reincarnating Thomas Edison’s 1894 hand-tinted film, Annabelle Dances.

Both filmmakers will join Ruhl for a lively discussion with the audience.

Monday, May 7th, 7:30pm

$9 suggested donation – Tickets

Uniondocs
322 Union Avenue (at Maujer Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Trains:
L train to Lorimer street
G to Metropolitan Ave
J train to Hewes Street

Go to our website for more information on the rest of our Kinetic Cinema season.

The event includes a screening of Greenfield’s pioneering cine-dance and video-dance works that span 40 years and features the premiere of BODYSONGS, a work commissioned by WGBH TV in 1979 and made in collaboration with cinema verité filmmaker Richard Leacock. At the time Greenfield and Leacock shot a clothed version and a nude version of their film, but both ended up being banned from broadcast. When Leacock passed away in 2011, Greenfield revisited the nude video dance footage, restored it on today’s technology, and found in it a new concept of timeless nude duets as moving image art: BodySongs.

Other films on the program include MUSEic Of The BODy (2010), edited from Greenfield’s 1994 multimedia performance with video art pioneer Nam June Paik, the underground classic Element, and Wildfire from Greenfield’s acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle.

Greenfield and Haller will be present to answer questions and sign Flesh into Light at the reception following the screening.

In Flesh Into Light, Haller articulates the essential principles of cine-dance through Greenfield’s films, which re-invent dance as fundamental human motion not just for the camera, but as and inseparable from cinema. “For Greenfield, the body moving with and against the close-up camera can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meanings and mysteries of experience: movement and memory, the past and the present moment.” – Robert Haller, Flesh Into Light

Admission is $9. No reservations required.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. (@ 2nd Street)
Manhattan, New York.

Click here for more information on tickets.

Also of Note: Amy Greenfield will be present at Movement Media’s next Kinetic Cinema event on May 7th at Uniondocs, screening her film Wildfire and taking part in the discussion.

From May 14^th-18^th 2012, Isabel Rocamora will host this workshop sponsored by the Napolidanza Association and II Coreografo Elettronico festival (art director Marilena Riccio), Rocamora will lead a research workshop on video-dance techniques. This hands-on workshop explores the stages of making a ‘dance for camera’ film, specifically considering the relationships between the language of video and the individual choreographic creativity of the participants. The focus will be on providing the practical tools for the development and completion of a choreographic film.

This workshop will take place at the PAN-Palazzo Roccella, Via Dei Mille 60, 80121, Naples.

• Day 1: brief presentation on Isabel Rocamora’s work; what is a dance film/ the creative process; digital photography for movement (technical workshop, basic understanding of camera, light, location, space)/ collaboration methodologies
• Day 2: the body and the lens – choreographic exercises choreographing the body for the camera and the camera to the body; working with place – the moving body and site (the city, a park, a building)
• Day 3: creating material / storyboarding and shoot planning
• Day 4: shoot
• Day 5: reviewing material / basic editing (dependent on resources)/ presentation and distribution strategies

May 19^th 2012 will be devoted to the public screening of the movement-based short film produced during the workshop and a Forward Motion Screening presentation.

**The workshop is open to a maximum group of 15. It is designed for early professionals (in dance and film) and students of film, dance, physical theatre/performance who wish to develop their skills and understanding of these forms.  There is no age limit or condition in order to participate in the workshop. The attendance at the workshop and the participation at the Forward Motion screening is free.  Travel, accommodation, transport and per diem costs are charged to participants.

All interested parties can send a brief bio and letter of motivation to the following addresses: info@napolidanza.com ; annalisa.piccirillo@libero.it

Deadline: April 22nd 2012

Info and Contacts:
Direction: Marilena Riccio – Associazione Napolidanza/art director Il Coreografo Elettronico
info@napolidanza.com

Curator: Annalisa Piccirillo – PhD, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”
annalisa.piccirillo@libero.it

Additional screenings will be added to their website in the next few weeks, check the events page for a screening near you.

Check out one of their latest videos featuring  Flex group, Streets Finest.